Say It Now
by Daikon
Summary: Because it doesn't take everyone seventeen years to come to terms with their feelings; sometimes you have to give the person you love a little push in the right direction... (AU) - Companion piece to If You Have Something to Say.


Title: Say It Now

Rating: M. Good bit of profanity and a fair amount of not-that-explicit sexual content, pretty much all of which involves minors. Moderate amounts of teenage angst, so consider yourself warned if that's not your thing. Also even more teen partying, even though I'm still not quite certain what that means.

Disclaimer: Still don't own, please don't sue.

Summary: Because it doesn't take everyone seventeen years to come to terms with their feelings, sometimes you have to give the person you love a little push in the right direction...

Word count: ~21K.

AN: OMG companion piece to If You Have Something to Say. Wut. This is the first companion piece I've ever done and I'm super excited about it! (I do recommend you read If You Have Something to Say first, though, or this will make a lot less sense. It does still *work,* though). Also, somehow it's even longer than If You Have Something to Say. Oops again. XD

Enjoy!

* * *

I was twelve years old when I realized the way I felt about my best friend wasn't normal.

In my defense, I hadn't seen him since he left me behind to travel with his cousin when I was eight years old, which was well before I hit puberty, and he changed a *lot* between thirteen and seventeen, particularly in regards to his attractiveness. And even then it took me the better part of a long weekend alone with him before I straight-up dropped his laptop to the floor when he walked into his dorm room, swept the towel that had been wrapped around his waist up around his shoulders to towel off his hair, and I realized with absolute crushing horror that the weird fluttery feelings I'd been getting for the last two days had to do with all that stuff we'd talked about in fifth grade health when they split the class up into boys and girls. Except they hadn't mentioned what to do when you had girl-feelings for a boy!

Axel had been surprisingly cool about me dropping his laptop and even apologized for flashing me, said he was so used to living by himself that he forgot I was staying with him that weekend. My face must have been the color of a tomato though, and the whole rest of the weekend I was waiting for him to hear how loudly my heart beat whenever he looked at me (because it was *deafening*) and to stop and point and say he knew and that I was a freak and he never wanted to see me again.

Instead, he gave me a plane ticket to come visit him again in six months and I realized I wanted to kiss him.

I didn't tell anybody I felt that way. I figured it was an aberration. Hormones. I'd see Axel again in six months and everything would be normal and I would laugh at myself for getting so worked up over nothing. Then I'd tell Axel. He'd laugh too.

But I didn't. I saw him again at the airport when he picked me up, waiting at baggage claim with a huge beaming smile on his face that creased up the two teardrops inked into his cheeks, his hands wedged into his jean pockets, and I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, and couldn't imagine how I was going to make it through the weekend. I did, somehow, and at the end of the weekend when his poison-green eyes lit up with excitement as he handed me another plane ticket and I looked him right in those happy-eyes and I told him I wasn't coming back, not until he visited me. And I watched his eyes go dark and it took all the conviction I've ever possessed to not take it back, because I knew he wouldn't visit me. He wasn't ready to go back to the place where his mom died and he met the closest thing he'd ever had to a dad. It was cruel of me, and I knew it. But I couldn't keep seeing him like this, it was going to undo me and I would do something awful and we would stop being friends and then what? There wouldn't be much to live for, would there?

And so he dropped me off at the airport with a hug and a hair-ruffle and a renewed promise to write each other.

I didn't know then that I wouldn't see him again for five years.

* * *

It took me six months to get up the courage to finally tell him. Not that I had feelings for him, specifically. Just girl-feelings about boys. I was so terrified that my hands shook so badly that writing out that sentence ruined six different drafts of the letter before I gave up and typed it instead. And then I walked out to the mail box to post it nine different times before I finally put it in. Then it took me another five trips to actually leave it there. When the mailman came that Saturday morning I almost ran after him, screaming that I had made a mistake. My stomach hurt for a week and a half as I waited for Axel's damning response, telling me I was wrong, unnatural, someone he couldn't associate with anymore. His letter came two Tuesdays later, and after Mom handed it to me I went up to my bedroom and sat on the bed staring at the letter like it was a wild animal that might attack me for half an hour before I finally decided that if Axel was going to never want to speak to me again he had already decided that and all I was going to accomplish by waiting to find out was a wicked case of heartache. So I grabbed the letter and ripped it open as if I hadn't just been treating it like a snake and my eyes feverishly scanned the letter before they settled on

_"Jesus, Rox, I hope you haven't been holding that in for a while. Everything you're going through is perfectly normal. You're a teenager and you're just starting to figure out what you like, but there's a whole alphabet of things you can be: gay, straight, bi, trans, it's all perfectly fine and healthy even to experiment until you settle on something you feel comfortable with. You can be whatever you were born to be, and you shouldn't worry about what other people think. Some people will tell you it's wrong, sure, but fuck them. The people who matter know that you're still you no matter who you happen to be attracted to."_

Later at dinner Mom asked me if I had been crying. I told her of course not.

* * *

Axel and I wrote each other at least every other week for the next few years. His letters made me laugh, and they made me cry, and every single one of them made me fall a little more in love with him.

But he was sleeping with various random girls, and then he had a girlfriend, and when he talked about her it made me cry more. They broke up eventually, but the way he wrote about it made me feel like he had stuck a knife into my gut and twisted it; it just became more and more apparent that I was never going to cross the line from little brother figure into what I really wanted to be. So when my friend Hayner, the only openly gay boy in school (at least then) told me he had feelings for me, but it was okay if I didn't like him back, I just had a right to know, I leaned over and kissed him.

I didn't like him, not like that. I'd never liked anybody besides Axel like that. But when he'd told me how he felt his eyes had been shining the way I _knew_ mine did when I thought about Axel and I hoped maybe Hayner could love me enough for the both of us.

The first month was really hard, I told Axel. Walking down the hall hand-in-hand with another boy when you're fifteen is never going to go over as well as you hoped; people talked about you. Some of your friends couldn't deal with it, and they stopped being your friends. Tough kids threatened to beat the gay out of you. You didn't tell your parents because you know they aren't gonna understand, but after you come home with a nosebleed a couple times they stop believing you when you say nothing is wrong.

When Sora (who was on the lacrosse team and one of the most popular boys in school) started dating Riku (who could take anyone in the school with one hand tied behind his back without breaking a sweat) things started to get better. They got even better when one day Sora plunked his cafeteria tray down on the table next to me and announced that he was going to eat with us that day as Riku sat down next to Hayner. And Sora just… stayed. He befriended the two of us, and the two people who still remained from our old friend group, Pence and Olette.

Sora was just like that, and it was easy to see why everyone liked him. People started to like me and Hayner, too. Sora talked me into going out for lacrosse, and Riku suggested Hayner take up fencing. Being involved in sports made people like us more. We seemed normal, we just happened to also be gay. And things became okay again.

Until the day that I decided it was time to stop making Hayner wait for me, even though Hayner said it was okay, and the two of us, scared and awkward and only barely 16, fumbled our way through sex for the first time and it was clumsy and painful and it hurt so bad that I cried and then Hayner cried because he made me cry. I had wrapped Hayner in my arms, swearing up and down that it was okay, when the door I thought I had locked opened and Mom bustled in, chattering away, carrying a tray of milk and cookies. She saw us, and her words died mid-sentence and she dropped the tray with a terrible crash and she ran out of the room. I tried to run after her, but I think we messed something up somehow, because I could barely walk and it hurt to try. So I awkwardly hobbled after her and found her crying in her room. She said she'd never been so disappointed. Privately, I agreed with her - with all the fuss people made over sex, I guess I had expected something a little more. I later wrote Axel an abridged version of the whole messy business, leaving out my general disappointment; Axel was the last person I needed reassurance in the marvelousness of sex from.

He wrote back reassuring me that Mom was my mother and she loved me in her own backwards way, and that she would come around eventually. (He was right; things with mom were always a little tense after that, but she started looking me in the eyes again a few months later.) I appreciated Axel's advice, but it wasn't what I really wanted. It left me feeling empty. It all had just left me empty.

Hayner and I didn't have sex again, not once. So really, how can I blame him for that day, six months later, when I climbed in through his window to find him being pounded into the mattress by the school bully, Seifer?

Well, I think I can still blame him for choosing Seifer. Seifer was the single worst person for making our lives hell that first month. My bloody noses? Two of them were courtesy of him. Protesting too much and all that, I guess. Not that it mattered; I hightailed it out of there just as Hayner came. I guess he saw me scrambling out the window or something, because he called me fifteen times on the way home. I didn't answer a single one of them.

But I went home that night and wrote Axel, because it was really the only way I could begin to process what had happened. True, I had never loved Hayner the way he deserved to be loved. But I had still thought he felt about me the way I wanted to be felt about. It was a kick in the stomach followed by a few blows to the kidneys to find out that wasn't true, even if I couldn't have truly appreciated it if it was. He was my weird substitute Axel, the stand-in for the boy I couldn't have. And even if I couldn't have Axel, wasn't with him, I knew that he wouldn't do what Hayner did. But I was all jumbled up and confused and I just poured out all my hurt and self-loathing into that letter, posted it without a second thought because how could I fuck this up any more than it already was?

Axel's letter arrived three days later, which was unusually fast. I opened it without hesitation, scanned it, expecting him to have finally realized that I was some pathetic little kid while he was a kick-ass almost-adult in college and what the hell was he doing still talking to me? He surprised me again. Axel always seemed to.

_"Roxas, stop. No, I'm serious, stop. You can't keep thinking this kind of stuff about yourself, it'll kill you. And thinking of it killing you is killing me. I couldn't stand the thought of you feeling this way for a minute longer than you had to, so I overnighted this. That costs major money, which you know I don't have, so STOP IT."_

I flipped the envelope over and released a shaky laugh as I noted the extra stamps smattering the front of the envelope that I had missed the first time. And I knew, in that moment, that the whole rest of my life I was spoken for; it was Axel or no one. That fucking asshole.

_"Anyways, you have to know that you are perfect. And by perfect I mean as flawed as anyone else; you get attitudes about stupid shit and you can't stand up to your mom worth a damn, but you're an amazing person. You are AMAZING, Rox, really and truly. And if this Hayner kid is too much of a fuckup to realize that you are perfection and that he threw that away then it isn't your problem. It's his. And one of these days, he will wake up knowing that he ruined what could have been the best thing that's ever happened to him and he will never forgive himself. You have no idea how amazing you are, and you will probably never even begin to understand how important you are to me. I don't think I could live without you in my life; I know I said it already, but you're fucking perfection, Rox. You really are. So please don't ever think you're anything else, because I can't stand it. Don't hate yourself because other people don't value you the way you deserve to be valued. Just always remember that I love you for everything that you are, and for everything that you're not, and fuck everyone who says otherwise."_

I must have sat there rereading the letter about thirteen times, trying to process the line that my rational mind knew he didn't mean like that but still made my heart clench up in my chest. "_I love you for everything that you are, and for everything that you're not._" I was still sitting at the table when Mom walked into the room from the kitchen. "What've you got there, Roxas?"

"Nothing!" I folded the letter hastily and jammed it into my wallet, behind my student ID. Mom knew Axel and I wrote each other, but she didn't know how *often* Axel and I wrote each other, nor did I especially want her scanning the contents of this particular letter. Axel periodically sent me an "Aerith-appropriate" letter, as he called them, and I would let Mom look over those. She thought they were the only communication Axel and I had, and she liked to make sure they were "safe." She loved Axel, in her own way, but she was afraid he was going to corrupt me. Because your average sixteen-year-old doesn't interact with enough corruption on their own or something.

"All right, sweetie. Dinner's gonna be ready in fifteen minutes, if you want to set the table."

"Sure, Mom."

* * *

Finding out that Sora wasn't speaking to Hayner was way more surprising to me than Axel's letter. Sora's hardly capable of being mad at anyone, let alone anything so extreme as cutting off contact, so this was like, serious. Sora sat down between me and Demyx (star of the swim team and musical prodigy, joined the group about nine months ago) with a glare in the direction of Seifer's table, and Riku reached over and patted my shoulder. Riku had apparently quite curtly informed Hayner that morning that as Sora was no longer speaking to him it fell to Riku to inform him that he was no longer welcome at our table, seeing as only a complete bastard would screw someone over like that without even an apology. So Hayner had sat down at Seifer's table instead, face bowed towards his food as Fuu and Rai exclaimed loudly over what was the fag doing at their table. Seifer threw his arm around Hayner's waist and silenced his lackeys with a glare, then shot another glare around the cafeteria as if daring anyone else to comment. Pence and Olette got up, left our table and our group, went and joined Hayner instead.

And that settled it, though the rumors flew for months about what had happened; Hayner and I hadn't been the golden boys' couple of the school like Sora and Riku were, but we had gained enough popularity from osmosis that people knew enough to know that Hayner bouncing from me to Seifer, the previously self-proclaimed poster child for heteronormativity, was not normal and there was a story here. I wasn't talking, aside from to my friends, and they weren't talking either. Hayner and Seifer had nothing to be proud of in that story, so they kept it quiet as well. Eventually people got bored speculating and accepted the official story: an amiable break between the two of us followed by a drunken night between Seifer and Hayner resulting in previously unknown feelings coming forth. Maybe the drunken night part was true, I sure as hell hadn't stopped to breathalyze them. But it definitely came before the breakup.

Two months later, when Hayner finally apologized to me (and Sora forgave him immediately) he admitted that he and Seifer had been sleeping together for weeks before I walked in on them. It made me feel ill just to think of it, even though I knew that Hayner was far happier now with Seifer than he ever could have been with me. I excused myself to go to the bathroom, where I pulled Axel's letter out of my wallet and reread it with shaky hands.

This had become a bit of a compulsion for me. Whenever I felt overwhelmed or insecure or like I couldn't do something that I knew I had to do I would reread this letter, let myself be reassured by Axel's unwavering faith in me. I once tried to write him a letter explaining how significant his letter was to me, how much it helped, how knowing he believed in me made me believe in me. But every single draft of that letter invariably devolved into a tearstained profession of unrequited love, and after the eighth attempt to write it I decided to call it quits. I did love him, of course, and I'm sure he would have appreciated hearing it, but he would probably hear it differently than I meant it. And I couldn't deal with that, though admittedly it would probably end better than him hearing it the way I did mean it.

And a hand grabbed the letter out of mine and panic swelled in my chest. "Give that *ba-*ck …Demyx?"

The sandy blond grinned cheekily at me as he turned his eyes to the letter. "You ran away from your ex to read a note? Did he give this to you? Slip it to you under the eyes of everyone? Are you going to run away together? ...Who's Axel?"

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. FUCK.

"No one." The lie didn't even sound convincing to my own ears.

"He says he LOVES you? Ohmygod, Roxas, did you cheat first?!"

"No! Not… No. He's straight."

"Doesn't fucking sound like it."

"Shut up," I answered, grabbing the letter back. "He's like my brother. He was just trying to cheer me up after everything happened with Hayner."

"But you like him." Demyx's eyes grew big and he pointed at me accusingly "More than you liked Hayner!"

"Demyx, please."

"No, you totally do! How long have you liked him?" I mumbled something incoherent and Demyx's eyes narrowed. "Rox, either you tell me now or I'll go tell everyone and then *you* can tell them."

"…Forever? Since I knew what it meant, I guess." I muttered, glaring at Demyx.

"That's insane! How long have you *known* him?"

"Birth."

"Haha."

"I'm serious. He was in the room when my mom had me."

"No fucking way! Why haven't we met him?"

"He moved away when I was eight. He's at HBU now."

"So he's older."

"Five years."

Demyx whistled and raised an eyebrow. "And he has no idea?"

"Nope."

"But then Hayner-?"

"Distraction. Still hurt like hell, though."

"Shit, man. That sucks."

Demyx walked me back to the cafeteria prattling away about his own May-December romantic entanglements, and I half rolled my eyes, worried someone else would overhear and think to ask me how that came up. I shouldn't have worried. I know Demyx better than that.

"Roxas is in love with an older guy named Axel!" Everyone at our table swung around to gape like fish at me as I spluttered.

"DEMYX!"

"What? They have a right to know."

"You said you wouldn't tell them if I told you!"

"No I didn't. I said I wouldn't make *you* tell them. Totally different."

"You're in love with some dude named Axel who none of us have heard of before. This happened how?" Riku deadpanned, as flatly as you please.

"They've known each other since Roxas was born," Demyx responded for me, nodding smartly. "Roxas has been in love with him most of his life, but Axel is straight. So Roxas settled for Hayner instead."

"Goddamnit, Demyx, I'm going to fucking kill you. And then resuscitate you so I can kill you again."

"And you told Demyx, but not the rest of us?" Sora looked hurt.

"Not deliberately," I grumbled half under my breath.

"He has a note from Axel that he was reading. I swiped it. Axel said he loved Roxas in the note, but Roxas says it's all platonic. I think Axel is a closet case, personally."

Riku raised his eyebrow. "I think there's only one thing we can do. Sporting event at Sora's?" Sora's face lit up as I buried my face in my hands.

"Sporting event at Sora's" was our code for "excuse to get out of our houses on a school night and get wasted as a group instead." Since we were all involved in some kind of sport and Sora's mom Rinoa was on the booster club for every sports team at the school, we could all go to our parents and say there was a mandatory sporting event we couldn't get out of. And since Rinoa's motto was 'teen's will do teen stuff no matter what you do' she liked to let us be teens with some parental guidance. Also she had no problem buying us booze, provided we kept it in the house. So far, nobody had gotten busted, but since that was always a risk we typically only had them in dire circumstances, like the night after I walked in on Hayner and Seifer (I drank myself basically comatose that night). We used them to either blow off steam when we were hella stressed or to talk out important shit. This was going to be an "important shit" night, I could tell already.

"I think I'm gonna pass."

"Roxas, don't make my mother call your mother. Again."

"Dammit, Sora."

Sora stuck his tongue out at me and crossed his eyes. "You'll have more fun with us than you would moping at home. Plus, we're gonna do this no matter what, whether or not you're there to talk about it. Wouldn't you rather be there to stamp out our speculations?"

I glared. "Be careful your face doesn't get stuck like that, asswipe."

Sora grinned and clapped his hands together with delight, and I dropped my forehead to the table with a groan. I was in for a long night.

* * *

I took a long pull from my Corona, listening to drunk!Sora ramblingly ponder whether or not Axel had ever thought about me like that. I almost choked on it when Demyx chirped that I should kiss Axel and see. "NO, Axel and I aren't gonna kiss, dumbass. Remember, he's straight. As in he dates girls. Sleeps with girls. Kisses girls. Does not kiss little awkward blond boys who are like a brother to him."

"God, you're starting to sound like Seifer. 'He's so gay, being gay is gross, I would never be gay because being gay is wrong and look how gay he is, now I'm just gonna go stick my dick in him real quick and then date him.'"

Ouch. I knocked back a shot of Jack and pointed a bit shakily at Demyx, "Dude! I may not love Hayner, but that's still not cool to reference my ex getting banged by the guy he cheated on me with. Especially not in this context."

Sora giggled and tipped over. "Buht Hayner is so sad, Roxas! He lobed you and you din't lobe him back, and then we all reject 'im cause he found somebody who actually likes him. Poor guy!"

"He seems happy enough with Seifer, and without us." Riku replied evenly. (Of the five of us at Sora's that night, Riku was by far the least drunk, despite having drunk more than all the rest of us. Tall bastard.)

It was true, though. Hayner, though he had finally apologized to me, did not seem to miss us much. The fact that Pence and Olette chose to stick to Hayner rather than me in the fallout probably helped with that, though. It still hurt me to have lost them, but I did have Axel and the rest of my friends. Hayner deserved to keep the people who loved him, the same way I did. But I missed them. And I missed Hayner. Not as my boyfriend, but as the timid fifteen year old he had been before he had told me he liked me. My friend.

I wondered, for a brief moment, how my life might be different if I hadn't kissed him when he told me. If I had just said it didn't bother me, but I didn't feel the same. I wouldn't be at Sora's right now, I knew that much. We would never have become friends at all. I wouldn't be friends with any of my current friends, Axel notwithstanding. I would still be friends with a group of assholes who said they were okay with gays but when actually presented with gays said they couldn't deal and walked. It was worth it, I thought sadly. It was worth losing Hayner as a friend to realize who my true friends were.

I tuned back in just in time to hear Tidus suggest a betting pool based on if and when Axel and I would get together and I mentally took back every nice thing I had just thought. These guys were definitely not my true friends.

My protests fell on drunk and excited ears, which means that they all may as well have been deaf.

Demyx put $60 on after high school but before I finished college.

Sora put $80 on after Axel's first marriage failed spectacularly, causing him to renounce women.

Tidus put $50 on after I graduated from college and we were on similar levels for the first time in our lives.

Riku looked at me contemplatively for a moment, then put $100 on within six months of the next time Axel and I saw each other, whenever that may be.

I matched Riku, except my money was on "never gonna happen, you guys." Tidus objected, saying that my betting corrupted the integrity of the wager. I replied that if Axel wanted to be with me I wasn't going to pass that up in favor of money and he relented.

Demyx announced he was going to take bets from other people we knew too, and I just shook my head. Riku nudged me and rolled his eyes, mouthing "Dem, right?" and I laughed.

"You know, Rox," Riku whispered "In a situation like this, you can steer into it and it'll go away, or you can try to run away from it and everybody will just be more interested." I sighed, but had to admit Riku had a point.

So for the next two weeks I talked nonstop about my lost penpal love and how doomed our love was amongst all my close friends and acquaintances. The betting pool climbed higher and higher until it finally leveled out around $2.5 grand (bored little rich kids and their money are soon parted, yeah?). Soon it had spread throughout the school, which meant when Hayner confronted me about it in the bathroom one day he was well within his rights.

"I always knew." He said a little sadly as he washed his hands in the sink next to mine.

"What?"

"I knew you didn't love me, at least in some part of me. But I didn't want to know, y'know?"

I nodded. "I'm sorry."

"It was that guy you were always writing?"

"Yeah."

"I hope he comes around. It took Seifer a while."

"Wait-" I stared at him, eyes widening in comprehension. "Seriously?"

Hayner grinned at me and punched my shoulder. "Like you have a leg to stand on."

"You're a fucking *asshole*!" I laughed, and he skirted around me and out of the bathroom with a grin and a wave. And I knew he and I were going to be okay.

I was still in a good mood from that as Sora gave me a lift home from lacrosse. Riku was staying late because he had a wrestling match that weekend, so I was riding shotgun, flipping idly through radio stations as Sora chattered away next to me. He pulled up to my house, gasped, told me "DUDE, I think he's here." I rolled my eyes and laughed, because my friends had been pulling "OMG he's here"'s all week long, even though I had barely told them enough about Axel for them to recognize him anyways (redheaded, eyes like ivy, hot as sin: not exactly enough to get a forensics drawing from).

"I'll see you tomorrow, Sora," I replied as I grabbed my bag and moved to get out of the car.

Sora grabbed my arm, looked intensely into my eyes. "Roxas. Fuck his brains out."

I pulled away, still laughing, and turned towards my house. And dropped my gym bag as my whole body stopped working. I couldn't breathe, couldn't think, because Axel was there, he was RIGHT THERE.

Some detached part of my brain registered that Axel seemed just as surprised to see me as I was to see him, which was really fucking weird since this was my house and he *must* have come here to see me. Or at least with the expectation that I would show up sooner or later, if he had decided he wanted to see Mom or Dad for some reason (unlikely). But the fact that he was currently puffing on the afterimage of a dropped cigarette (which was hilariously adorable, by the way) suggested rather strongly that he hadn't been expecting me. I didn't give a shit.

I launched myself, full-bodied, up the steps and into him, throwing my arms around him as I did, clinging for dear life. I hadn't known just how much I had missed him until right at this moment, when I could see and feel him in all his beautiful glory. For a fraction of a second I knew what unadulterated terror felt like when Axel remained rigid in my arms, as though he really hadn't come by to see me. As though my hugging him so fiercely crossed some kind of line that I couldn't uncross. But then he wrapped his arms around me and buried his face in my hair and I just hoped I wasn't crying hard enough to leave any marks behind on his shirt.

* * *

I insisted Axel had to stay for dinner. Mom was trying to shoo him out, because being around someone who smoked would make me pick up the habit or something. (Yeah right. Smoking was *_gross,_* even though Axel almost made it look sexy). I just calmly informed him that he had to try whatever Mom was cooking because it was awesome, set an extra plate out on the table, and played on Mom's loyalty to Tifa to get her to drop the protests that came the second she and I were alone in the kitchen. ('His smile is just like his mom's, isn't it?' shut her right up).

So twenty minutes later, Axel was sitting across from me in his old seat at the dining room table and I was just marveling over how much more gorgeous he was five years later. He'd gotten a couple more things pierced, most notably his tongue, which did funny things to my insides when I noticed it (let's just say I was glad that I was already settled at the table for dinner when he rolled his eyes and stuck his tongue out at me or things may have gotten real awkward real quick). He'd bulked up a little, not enough to make him like, big, just enough that his previously skinny teenager frame now looked like a perfume model or something. Not that with his whole bad-boy persona that he could get a job like that, unless they were catering to bikers. My mind rolled that image over a couple times; Axel would be a fantastic pin-up biker-boy, especially if we involved leather outside of just the jacket, like- my train of thought screeched to a halt as I shook myself, reminded myself to pay attention. There was a time and a place for those thoughts (later, in private) and having them here would only decrease my overall quality of life, in that if either my mother or a certain very sexy redhead found out what I was thinking I would either no longer have one or no longer have a reason for one. Needless to say, I tuned back in, fortunately just in time to hear Mom asking if anything interesting happened today at school. I began prattling merrily about my classes, subtly transitioned to lacrosse practice and our lacrosse lineup and our chances of winning the championship this year and oh, by the way there's a lacrosse event at Sora's tonight, the annual new-member pranking, that I have to be at before our game tomorrow, mind if Axel gives me a lift over? Mom left to call Rinoa and check, and I just beamed at Axel. All I wanted in the world right now was to be alone with him. Not even in a sexual or romantic way, I just wanted to *be* with him. Mom came back and said I could go once I finished my milk, and as I chugged I silently thanked every deity I could think of for the awesomeness that is Sora's mom.

Within five minutes I had run upstairs and thrown some shit into my gym bag, grabbed my backpack and run back down the stairs and out to Axel's car, yelling "Bye mom!" as I did. Axel dumped my bags in the trunk, swung over the door of the car into the driver's seat and buckled in.

"So where to?"

"Wherever you want," I laughed. Axel blinked at me owlishly.

"But the lacrosse prank-"

"Was bullshit." I grinned at him. "Please, do you think for a second my mom would have let me out of the house with you if she didn't think my ultimate destination was somewhere not with you?"

"But she called your friend's mom. So what...?" Axel trailed off and I grinned as it occurred to me that Axel thought I was even more of a kid than I was. Time to catch him up.

"Rinoa's cool, man. She recognizes that teens will be teens and likes to let us do it with something resembling adult supervision. She lets us crash there whenever we need to, no questions asked."

"So what's the plan?"

I shrugged, taking a deep breath and pretending that saying this didn't make me as nervous as it did. "Honestly? I know this sounds hella cheesy, but I just want to be near you. I can't even believe that you're really here, y'know? So I don't care what we do."

Axel's mouth quirked up, and my heart fluttered. How did I not realize that it was always gonna be Axel before I even tried to get with Hayner? It was so obvious that no one else would (could) ever make me feel this way. "Well then, let me show you how us college graduates live."

Axel took me back to his apartment, which had the whole broke-as-fuck-chic decorating thing down, with mismatched secondhand furniture, unframed posters tacked to the walls, old tables stained with smattered cup rings, and chipped mismatched dishes scattered across all the flat surfaces. The only nice things in the whole apartment were the HD TV and five gens of gaming systems. It was so Axel; I loved all of it.

He threw me a bag of chips as he disappeared into the kitchen and came back with a handle of Cuervo, shot glasses, french onion dip, and a six pack of Bud light. Maybe it was because I was nervous. Maybe I just couldn't tell between the rush I got from being with Axel and the rush I got from drinking. Maybe it was because I didn't think Axel's idea to pair bbq chips with french onion dip was a good one and I didn't eat a lot at dinner. Whatever it was, I was hammered drunk, quick.

I have a few hazy memories of drunken chattering, and mercifully only a few interspersed seconds here and there of puking in the bathroom, with the majority of those centered on Axel's hands on my back, shoulders, in my hair as he tried to comfort me and calm me down. I know I must have passed out not too much longer after that, but for the life of me I couldn't give details.

* * *

What I did know was that I woke up the next morning with my head pounding like an elephant was tap-dancing on it. The sun hurt my eyes, I felt like I was going to puke, and I couldn't remember where I was, until I saw a familiar red porcupine hairstyle laying on the bed next to me. Axel. It came back in a rush, and like that, it was as though the hangover was gone. I traced the teardrop on Axel's visible cheek gently, smiled at how the contact made his lips quirk up unconsciously. I was debating pressing a kiss to his cheek while he was asleep and would never ever know when my eyes caught a flash of red on Axel's apparently malfunctioning alarm clock and I leapt out of the bed in a flurry of panic, words tumbling all over each other as I flailed about, trying to pull on my uniform as fast as possible "Holy shit, I'm late, I'm so late oh my god Mom is going to find out I didn't crash at Sora's Mom's gonna call Rinoa and Sora's gonna be pissed at me except that doesn't matter because Mom is gonna kill me, oh my god, Quistis will call her for sure, that fucking whore, can't believe I overslept, Axel are you awake, Axel, wake UP!"

"huhwha?" Axel's eyes fluttered open as I tied my tie messily, looking down at him with pure panic.

"It's nine forty five, I was supposed to be in class an hour and a half ago and my first period teacher is a complete bitch and she will definitely call my mom-" I can hear the hysteria tinging my voice and yet I can't seem to stop talking until Axel interrupts me.

Axel leapt up, grabbing his keys from the bedside table as he did so. "Let's go!"

The drive itself was uneventful, unless you count my idle nervous chatter and Axel's good luck- we hit all the lights right- as events. But Axel was stunned silent when he saw the high school. "It's nicer than HBU," he finally managed to choke out.

"Shut up, it is not." I could feel my face turning pink. This all was just the opposite of progress, Axel must be thinking I was more of a spoiled little rich kid than ever. "Anyways, Mom picked it, not me."

"Of course she did." He ruffled my hair and I smiled sheepishly. "Well, go on!" I bolted from the car.

* * *

Quistis retained her fucking bitch status. By the time I got into the classroom she had already called Mom to report that I was late. Mom had asked if Sora was there. Quistis said yes. (That WHORE). So since no amount of pleading with Quistis was going to help, I didn't give her the satisfaction. Two periods later I sat at my lunch table enjoying my last meal and trying to think of any sort of excuse (so far food poisoning was looking like my best bet) when Sora slammed his tray down on the table next to me.

"And what were *you* doing last night, mister? You asked my Mom for an assist and then you didn't come over? What gives?"

"And for that matter," Riku drawled with a smirk as he set his own tray down "who was the wicked-hot redhead in the convertible who dropped you off this morning? An hour late, I may add, tsk, tsk."

Everyone whirled to stare at Riku, flabbergasted, and then turned back to me just as quickly. Sora spoke first, which should have come as no surprise to anyone.

"Oh my God it really WAS Axel, wasn't it!"

"Whoa, whoa, wait a second, Rox, you're gonna have to help me out here, who was really Axel?" (Demyx next).

"When I dropped him off last night at his parent's. Hot older redhead on the porch, the two acted like they hadn't seen each other in years, but I drove away before I could see much else. I joked that it was Axel, but it was, wasn't it? Wasn't it?"

Well. No point in denying it, since they probably wouldn't believe it anyways. "Yes."

"So why did you need the bail for the night? What happened?" (Tidus).

"Nothing. We hung out. I got wasted. I think I threw up, but I only about half remember. Tequila is not my friend."

I almost missed the knowing glance between Riku and Sora. Almost. "What?"

"Whatever do you mean, Roxas?"

"Riku, lay off the bullshit, you and Sora just communicated telepathically and we all know it. So what?"

Sora piped up. "Well really, Roxas. Who serves someone they aren't trying to bang tequila? Unless they're in a sorority. And I assume Axel isn't, since he looked very male from where I was sitting."

I would have argued. I really would have, except at that moment Hayner vaulted over a table to claim the chair across from me. "I heard a hot older guy dropped you off this morning an hour late. Axel?" Even if he hadn't vaulted over the table, half of the school would have tuned in, since it was the first time we had talked in public. With the added lure of the cafeteria calisthenics and Hayner's inability to keep his voice down, well... there goes anything resembling privacy. Dammit.

"Yes. It was Axel. No, nothing happened."

The betting pool climbed another thousand dollars by the end of the day.

* * *

Mom was freaking pissed when I got home. I wasn't surprised, really, but I had at least been hoping to catch her in a moderately reasonable frame of mind. No such luck.

"Roxas Terah Strife, you are in so much trouble."

"I came in with Sora but I wasn't feeling well, so I took a detour to the bathroom. I was throwing up all first period, that was all, Mom."

"Don't lie to me! It was Axel, wasn't it? You never acted out before he came back. Perfect attendance, star athlete, zero tardies. He's a terrible influence, it comes from having no stable father figure; lord knows Tifa did her best, but she was only one person. I am not going to let your misguided admiration for a troubled kid ruin your future!"

"Mom!"

"Don't 'Mom' me, this is for your own good and someday you'll thank me for this. You are grounded until you graduate, and you are forbidden from seeing Axel. At all! Is that clear?"

I didn't even try to argue, because it would only make her madder. So I stormed up to my room instead and called Axel before she thought to take away my phone.

"GROUNDED?" he snorted.

"Shut up, asshole, I'm actually in trouble. You could have told me your alarm clock malfunctioned."

"Dude, you could have asked me to set it! It works fine when it's actually on."

"You didn't fucking set an alarm for me to get to school on time?"

"Well excuse me for having a nontraditional work schedule! Next time I will make sure to consider the fact that you're still a child. In school."

Ouch. Axel couldn't have hit a more sensitive spot if he'd been trying.

"Well then you'll be glad to hear that this 'child' is forbidden from seeing you ever again, so long and have a nice life."

"Don't you dare hang up the phone, brat, or I'll drive over there and camp on your lawn until either your mom relents or calls the cops. And I'd really rather not get arrested this week."

"Well then. What do you propose?"

* * *

"Dude, one of these days we're gonna get arrested for this shit." Axel muttered as he lit his cigarette. I had just climbed out of my bedroom window, down Mom's trellis, and run down the lawn, jumping into Axel's car and escaping for the night. This had become the norm in the last few weeks for the two of us, Axel driving up to the house and me jumping into the car on the run, hoping my parents didn't see me. Most romantic high school cliche ever, aside from the fact that the Romeo in the scenario didn't actually think of me as Juliet, right?

Of course, Axel had run three stop signs in our mad dash to not get caught and he did have a point about cops. But that wasn't what I was worried about right now. Instead, I eyed the cigarette currently in his hands with distaste, wondering if I could knock it out of his hands. "Don't even think about it, shrimp. You will lose every game of keep away, every fucking time." Of course the fucker could read my mind. It was my mistake for forgetting that.

"Don't come crying to me when you get cancer, then. I won't come to your funeral." I snapped back.

"Your concern is touching, truly." Axel took a deep drag off his cigarette and exhaled slowly. "But you know you'd be the one jumping tearfully down onto my coffin, like something out of Shakespeare or some shit like that."

"Asshole."

"Whoo hoo hoo, where'd the little private school kid learn a word like that?" I had known that word since I was five, been using it since I was eleven. Way to make me seem younger than I am and remind me, yet again, that this was never ever going to happen and that I was totally insane.

"Listening to you, fucker."

Axel let out a little snort and ruffled my hair casually. I wanted to rub my head into his hand like a kitten. (I didn't). "You're fucking adorable when you try to act like a badass, kid." And that freaking word again. I was at the very least done with hearing that.

"Don't call me 'kid', jackass."

"I was there when you were born, you're always going to be a kid to me." I needed a drink. I fished Axel's flash out of the glove compartment, unscrewed the top.

"Five years is not that much." Oh please, please, please.

"Five years is so that much." Axel snorted in reply as he snagged the flask out of my hands before I could even take a sip and I deflated internally. It wasn't like I didn't know he wasn't interested with or without the age difference, but it would be nice to feel like I didn't have *everything* wrong. Just one obstacle that I wouldn't have to overcome to get the guy of my dreams, would that really be so much to ask? Meanwhile, Axel had knocked back a shot, smirked. "For instance, I have my own apartment while you just snuck out the window of your parents house for, what, the third time this week, because you're - and correct me if I'm wrong - grounded?" _Oh, fuck you. That's it, I'm done with you, I'm just going to hop out of the car, walk home, and never speak to you again. Or I would if you weren't so goddamn cute when you smirk._

"Okay, fine, you're ancient, and as previously mentioned, will totally die before me and I will not cry at your funeral."

"Just for that, you're not getting any whisky."

I stuck out my tongue childishly. At this point, why the hell not play the part? I was completely insane for wanting and hoping anyways, I may as well not torture myself by trying to act age appropriate on top of that. "So riddle me this, old man. If you're so mature, what are you doing driving around the city at midnight with a teenager when you could be doing something more age-appropriate like going to a bar?"

Axel released a bark of laughter, "Touche." He took another swig from his flask, then handed it over to me. I took it gratefully. "We need to get you a fake."

"Um, not exactly what I meant."

He turned those sparkling green eyes towards me, smiled like a child on December twenty-fifth at seven oh five am. "Yeah, but it's what *I* meant." My stomach turned over and I could hear my heart in my ears; he wanted to bring me into his world, rather than leave me behind, and I couldn't help but want to believe that that meant something. Rationally, I knew that moments like this were what fueled all the insanity, but even with all the heartache they brought me I absolutely would never give any one of them up.

"Okay."

* * *

Axel had the (what he dubbed) brilliant idea that Mom would be less likely to bust us if we saw each other at a random variety of times and days, rather than me sneaking out every few nights. Mom slept like a log that had been dosed with a sleeping potion after a full week of sleep deprivation, but I wasn't about to start arguing with anything that meant I got to see more of Axel. Right now, we were averaging four or five times a week, which was way more than we would be managing with sneaking out. Today, Axel was sneaking me off campus so that he could take me to lunch. Demyx had been insisting all week that it was a date. I kept rolling my eyes and telling him he was delusional.

We were sitting in the picnic area outside the school waiting for Axel when it came up again, and I told him again that he was kidding himself in the hopes of winning a ridiculous bet, to which he shook his head and replied "I thought the same thing when Zexy took me to lunch the first time. You'll see."

Sora and Riku agreed with me. Kind of.

"It's not a date just because they're going to get food-"

"THANK YOU, now can we drop it-"

"-Because it's not a date unless the inviter displays certain behaviors towards the invitee. It's not a date if the place doesn't serve any form of alcohol, it's not a date if you pay for your own food, and it's not a date if the restaurant serves primarily cheapy American fare, like burgers. It IS a date if he picks you up, or if you guys planned it way in advance, or if he feeds you anything at any point. That's a super flirty date indicator."

"Sora, I love you but you are reading way too much into nothing."

"Roxaasssss, these work. Really. Tell him, Riku."

The silver haired boy nodded sagely. "How do you think I finally got Sora to realize I liked him, moron that he is?" Sora smacked Riku's arm and the taller boy pressed a kiss to the brunet's cheek. God, they were so fucking adorable it made my teeth hurt.

"Okay, but guys, these are things that Axel and I do all the time. Axel's old enough to drink, and he likes to, so we go places with alcohol. And he has a job and I don't, so he pays. He has a car and I can't drive, so he picks me up. And we have to plan things in advance so my mom doesn't catch us. It doesn't mean anything more than that."

"What about the feeding thing?" Tidus demanded.

"Well he's never ever done that, so."

"I still say it's a date," nodded Demyx, but Axel pulled up then and I was mercifully spared any additional arguing with them as I jogged to his car and hopped in. I glanced back at my friends and immediately slouched down in the seat, praying Axel hadn't noticed the thumbs up Sora was giving me.

* * *

"Sushi? Really, of all the places you could have picked, you picked sushi?"

"Sushi's delicious, excuse you."

"Yes, wormalicious." I muttered under my breath.

I ordered ice cream and a side of rice, pointedly refusing to eat anything raw. When they informed me that the only ice cream they had was green tea flavor I almost lost it (who doesn't have chocolate?!), but managed to hold it together. "Sure, whatever. Just as long as it is sweet, cold, and not raw."

Axel ordered three different sushi plates and a beer. (My fake was coming in the mail any day now, but for the moment I was drinking Dr. Pepper).

When they brought out the food, I was shocked that it only took one bite for me to realize that green tea ice cream was my new favorite food. I ordered another two bowls and happily slurped them down as Axel worked his way through his tuna rolls, eel rolls, and crabstick rolls (ew.)

"Don't expect me to still be seen with you in public when you get disgustingly fat." Axel clucked after I ordered one more bowl and I glared at him as he snagged another piece of eel roll and popped it into his mouth.

"As long as you don't expect me to visit your salmonella-ridden ass in the hospital," I shot back, stabbing my ice cream a little more viciously than normal with the spoon.

"Unagi's cooked, moron," Axel rolled his eyes at me.

"Yeah, but that tuna thing you ate earlier wasn't." I shuddered just thinking about it.

"Your mom really sheltered the fuck out of you, didn't she? This shit is explicitly prepared to be safe for human consumption. Try a piece, seriously."

"No thanks." I had enough problems without having to worry about actually getting food poisoning, thanks.

"Awww, c'mon Roxy. Scared you'll like it?"

"Not even a little bit."

Axel's eyes sparkled as he grinned slyly. "Tell you what, if you try it and you seriously hate it, I'll never say another word about it." I'll be honest- it was the tentatively mischievous look that did me in. Not the promise of no more teasing, but the idea that I could make him happy with something so small. It was completely stupid, I freely admit. But still...

"…Promise?"

"Cross my heart and hope to get busted with you by your mom." I had to chuckle at that, because the alternative was admit how terribly much that possibility frightened me. I gingerly removed my fork from the empty rice bowl and poked a piece of Axel's sushi with it. "It's not gonna bite you, dumbass. And who eats sushi with a fork?" Axel sighed, exasperated, and picked up a piece of sushi with his chopsticks and held it out to me.

My brain went into fucking overdrive as I looked at the piece of sushi, then back at Axel, everything my friends had said earlier rolling through my brain at once. I had no idea how to even begin to handle this one, but asking 'is this a date?' was the absolute bottom of the list, below eating every piece of sushi in the restaurant and stabbing myself in the chest with my fork. I settled for raising an eyebrow, as if to say 'are you planning to feed me?'

Axel rolled his eyes. "Just eat it already, god." Apparently he was.

So, I did the only thing I could think of to do: I leaned forward and grabbed the piece with my teeth, scooting back in my chair as though the plate on the table might catch on fire at any moment. But I had to admit "Okay, fine, that is actually pretty tasty."

Axel grinned at me, then glanced at his watch, dropped some money on the table. I only kind of noted that this was happening, as I was a little bit shellshocked, but I realized when he was looking at me, processing his sentence a few seconds late; "Do you need me to put the top up on the way back? It looks like you got a little sun on the way over here."

"Wha- oh. No, my mom will think I just forgot to put on sunscreen before practice. It's fine, I know you prefer top down."

"Hell yeah I do! Everything's better topless." He winked at me and my breath caught in my throat. *Was* this a date? No, because that was insane. I was going completely insane. Also I was going to kill my friends. Kill, kill, murder, kill.

"You coming or what?"

"Uh, yeah. Sorry, man."

* * *

"So, so?"

"I don't want to talk about it, Dem."

"So it *was* a date!"

"How did you get that out of-"

"Roxas, Demyx, are the two of you teenaged girls that I have to separate, or can you sit next to each other without interrupting my lesson?"

"Sorry Dr. Hojo," we chimed together. I pointedly refused to accept any of the five different notes Dem tried to pass me throughout the period, and when the bell rang I hightailed it out of bio before he could try to say anything else.

* * *

Axel was so fucking pretty. You wouldn't think that a guy could be pretty like Axel was, but that's probably only because you've never seen Axel, and in that case you are seriously missing out because he's really pretty. He was driving me home after my first night out being 21 (fake id came, whaaaaat!) and I was druuuuuunk! I was as drunk as any 21 year old should be on their birthday, thank you. I had been trying to talk to Axel for a while, but a little bit ago I decided I would rather just look at him (who knew face tattoos could be so hot?) than try to muddle through his half-understanding of my drunken slurring. Excpet I wasn't _that_ drunk guys, come on. OH and this was IMPORTANT right I forgot!

"Omigod, Iforgot t'tell you!"

"Yeah, Rox?"

"M'mom sais I cango'way forSpringbreak Whatchudoin' 'ntwoweeks?"

Axel reached over and ruffled my hair and I closed my eyes contentedly. "The same thing I do every other week, dork. Working and hanging out with your sorry ass, though it sounds like I'll just be working if you're gonna be gone."

I shook his head back and forth and then I realized that that had been a terrible. fucking. decision. omg. I plastered my fingers to my temples in an attempt to stop the spinning. "Uh-uh, No, 'mjus' TELLIN'her that'mgoin' 'drather staywifyou"

I looked over at him with my favorite puppy-expression, the one that always worked on Mom, and Axel laughed. "Are you asking if you can stay with me for a week? Because you know that you never have to ask, you're always welcome."

I felt the grin splitting my face and tried to pretend it was just because I was drunk but I don't think Axel bought it. Oh well. I got to stay with him for a whole week, so fuck everything else! Weeeee! Then I yawned and curled up in the seat again. "LobeyouAxe." It was true, dammit, so why shouldn't I say it? I should shout it from the rooftops until he feels it to! Even if that isn't how it works and hardly makes any sense. _Shut up, logic, you're mean._

Axel laughed and ruffled my hair again. "Love you too, kiddo. Don't go to sleep yet, we've gotta get you back into your parent's." My eyes snapped back open. Home to my parents? But it was my twenty-first birthday and the only thing I wanted for a present was to be with Axel all the time!

"Noooooowannastaywifyou"

"You can call me once you get inside, it'll be almost the same."

_No it wouldn't!_ "'snotthesameAtALL" I insisted.

But before it should even have been legal (not that legality meant anything at all tonight, even though I was twenty-one now) Axel pulled up in front of my parents and asked for the keys so that he could get me inside and I almost told him I lost them so I would have to spend the night with him but I didn't want him to think I was too irresponsible because *kids* are irresponsible and I'm an adult now, his equal even, maybe, maybe, please? So I handed them over and he half-carried me into the house and up to my room and I could totally get used to being carried by Axel in any form because it felt really nice and comforting, like coming home after a really sucky day of school. Axel settled me down into my bed and I thought for a second that he might kiss me but then he didn't and I wished he had but then I grabbed his left hand and clung to it. Axel tried to pull away, but NO. _You're not getting away from me that easily, dammit, I want you._

"Stay."

Axel sighed and shook his head. "I'm not explaining that one to your mom. I'll text you tomorrow, see if you even remember any of this shit." I glared fiercely at him. If he didn't want me then he was an asshole who didn't deserve me, especially because it was my birthday and I the only present I wanted to unwrap was *him*. Is that too damn much to ask?

I let go of his hand and rolled over so my back was to that redheaded birthday-wish killing bastard. I heard a whispered "Night Rox!" from the window sill, but when I softened and rolled over he was already gone.

* * *

11:45AM: Morning princess, remember last night?

11:52AM: Vodka, tequila, and something delicious that I'm pretty sure was pure alcohol. Oh, also the fact that I'm NEVER DRINKING AGAIN

11:53AM: So nothing about Spring Break?

11:55AM: Shit, I meant to talk to you about that before we started drinking

11:55AM: Two weeks from now and you want to stay with me?

11:57AM: That's about the it. And you said?

11:58AM: I did already tell you, you know :P

11:59AM: Yeah but I don't remember

12:00PM: Is it somehow my fault you can't hold your liquor?

12:00PM: Would you just tell me, you fucking asshole?

12:01PM: You kiss your mother with that mouth?

12:02PM: You're a terrible influence, I hate you and I take back my desire to stay with you. I'll go to Cancun with the lacrosse team instead, have a nice life

12:02PM: Aw, Rox, don't spoil my fun, of course I said yes

12:03PM: Fucker

12:03PM: You love it ;)

* * *

So I was embarrassed as hell about the other night. Axel obviously didn't know that I remembered all of it, mostly because I lied and said I didn't. As drunk as I was that night I was mostly just impressed that I didn't blurt that I loved him straight out (except wait, yes I did, and he misunderstood me), but trying to get him to stay *cough*sleep*cough* with me wasn't all that much better, even if he hadn't realized that was what I was doing. And I was kind of irrationally pissed with him for not staying with me, even though I know how bad of an idea that would have been, and that I would have been even more upset when he didn't want me when things inevitably went in that direction. I felt like a cornucopia of emotions, and not in a good way. Also, I had no friggin' idea why I had been so convinced it was my birthday; that was still a month and a half away.

So I told Axel I was as busy as Santa the week before Christmas between now and Spring break and he said that he would occupy himself with work and it would be fine. That pissed me off too; I wanted him to miss me. But apparently he didn't. And rather than being busy, my life was absolutely positively dead for those two weeks.

All of this compounded together to result in me being ridiculously pissy and biting off the head of anyone who spoke to me out of turn. After the third time I snapped at Sora, Riku pulled me aside and told me to either man the fuck up or chill the fuck out, but to stop taking my issues out on my friends.

"Please, you were a prickly bitch before you got together with Sora, don't even start."

"Do you want to still have friends when this all goes down, Roxas? Because the way you're heading, you won't."

"Why do you care?"

"Sora likes you. And I like you most of the time, despite myself. But I don't like it when you make Sora cry, and Sora is more important to me than anything. If Axel is as important to you as you say he is, maybe you should try putting his happiness over your own."

"That's easy for you to say, when you're what makes Sora happy."

"Who's to say you don't make Axel happy?"

* * *

I wasn't even going to think twice about what Riku had said. Seriously, it wasn't even worth a passing idle notion, let alone devoting real time to. I didn't make Axel happy, at least not in the way that Riku made Sora happy. But that night, long after I got home but once I had finally walked up the stairs to my room, changed into my pjs and gone to open the window to get some air I found that there was a note wedged into my window and my heart beat too fast as I unfolded it, read it. Reread it. And once more.

And then I climbed down out of the window, down the trellis, pulling my phone out of my pocket as soon as my feet hit the ground. Sora had an exam tomorrow, and Demyx had a late-night date, so I called Riku.

"You think I have a chance? Prove it."

Riku pulled up in front of Axel's apartment at twelve forty-five, parallel parking like a boss, and I hopped out of the car feeling like my whole body was waking up from all my limbs being asleep for years - mad crazy pins and needles everywhere.

"I'm gonna wait for you to text me to say you're good. If I haven't heard back from you in twenty I'm gonna assume you're screwing each other's brains out and go home and go to bed. Sound fair?"

I nodded, because I didn't trust myself to speak.

"I'll wait here, yeah?" Nodded again. And turned, squaring my shoulders towards the apartment. Maybemaybemaybe…

Axel opened the door, wearing a half-unbuttoned button-down and an extremely loose tie around his neck. He looked disheveled and kissable and the way I launched myself into his arms was perfectly reasonable and manly, okay? Axel wrapped his arms around my waist and squeezed tightly and my heart copied the motion. But then, with no warning, he was holding me at arm's length, staring deeply into my eyes.

"Rox, it's one AM, what are you doing here? Is everything okay?"

Suddenly I questioned the wisdom of this decision, and my shoes became intensely fascinating. "I got your note. I missed you. That's all."

Axel tilted his head back, and my eyes latched onto the pale column of his neck for a second as he exhaled in both frustration and relief. "You should go home, kid, you've got school tomorrow and wasn't it something like three tests on Friday?" _Nope, not even one test._

"I don't want to go home yet. I want to hang out with you for a while." I pulled out my very best puppy eyes, but they did not work their magic today.

"I have to be at work early. So I guess you can stay as long as you can get yourself home in time to make it to school." _Time for the Hail Mary pass. He shoots..._

"I was hoping you'd give me a lift home? It's kind of cold out tonight."

"Jesus, Roxas, did you walk all the way here in the middle of the night?"

"Well mom won't let me get my license, so"

"What the hell is wrong with you, you could have gotten mugged or killed!" _And he misses spectacularly!_

"This is uptown, asshole, nothing like that's gonna happen here."

Axel bristled. "You sound just like your mother." My eyes widened. That hurt. That didn't sound like Axel. But it was.

"You take that back."

"No. You can't just do whatever the fuck you want because you're rich and privileged. Life has consequences and bad shit happens to good people all the fucking time. I never thought I'd see you acting like an entitled little prick though. I thought you were better than that." And that was a punch to the gut, coupled with a few extra kicks to the groin while I was down.

"What, do you think that you're better than me just because of where you came from? Because you're not!"

"Neither are you! You're a spoiled little mama's boy playing at being an adult and you have NO idea what the real world is like." I couldn't stand there anymore. I was going to burst into tears and just fall apart into a million pieces and I would never, ever be whole again and I couldn't do it in front of Axel. Not now. Not anymore. He was never going to want me. I had told myself that a million times, but I had still dared to hope. And yet here he was, calling me a spoiled child; what I'd always known he saw me as. Never an adult. Never someone who could have had a chance with him, if he wasn't straight. I'd just always believed he'd never say it in so many words.

"Fuck you, Axel." I ran. Turned tail and ran down the hall, down the staircase, threw the door to Riku's Beemer open and fell into the passenger seat, slamming the door shut before collapsing into sobs.

Moments later I heard Axel's voice yelling my name and I cracked my eyes open, saw him through the windows of the car. Riku had paid a lot of money for a professional exterior tint job so he and Sora could hook up in the car without being seen, so even though Axel's green eyes were trained right on mine, he couldn't see me.

"Roxas, where the fuck are you!"

"I take it things did not go well?" Riku's voice from next to me. I saw Axel catapult himself into his car and take of tearing down the road towards my parent's.

"No, they really fucking didn't."

* * *

An hour later, after Riku had dropped me off and I had curled up in my bed, all cried out, my phone rang. It had to be Axel; no one else would call me this late. I didn't trust myself to answer, so I let it go to voicemail. I lay there in the dark, phone pressed to my ear, eyes shining as I listened to Axel's voicemail over and over: "god FUCKING dammit, Roxas, if you died on the way home I'm never going to forgive you."

* * *

Sora threw a party that Friday to celebrate the start of Spring break like he did every year. He invited the whole school, like he did every year, and Rinoa and Squall had bought a crapton of liquor and several kegs, like they did every year.

I was absolutely fucking hammered. That was new, for this year. I didn;t normally get hammered, I usually got prtty tipsy but was still sober enough that if Mom called I could play off like I wasn't. But tonight I was having trouble seeing straight. (Heehee, except that I'm gay, so I never see straight, right?) I was drunker tonight than I had been on any of the nights that I had spent with Axel in the last few weeks. Even for my birthday!

I missed Axel like crazy. I wanted him here, I wanted to call him, I just wanted to see him right now goddammit. But he was mad at me. For no goddamn fcuking reason he was mad at me. All I had wanted was to goddamn see him the other night because he's sweet and cute and I missed him and he hadn't missed me AT ALL the fuckhead and so he got mad at me because I showed up when he didn't want me and I bet he doesn't even want me to come there for Spring break and I don't know what I'm gonna do if I don't get to see him and I almost text him when Riku takes my phone away and hands it to Sora who runs off and hides it in like an urn or some shit in his house where I won't be able to find it. My friends suck dick. Cause they're gaaaaaaaay. I start giggling at that and fall over on the couch, then roll right off because I fell on top of a couple making out; some red-haired chick kissing a black haired chick. I think the red-haired girl's name is Kira. Kiara? Something. She's in my homeroom. I don't know the black-haired chick, though. But I don't want to be up on them. I wanted to be up on a different redhead. You know who I mean. Axel. In case you didn't.

I crawled away from the couch and bumped into a different couple, pushed up against a wall. Demyx and some periwinkle-haired older guy. He may have been even shorter than me as if that's even fucking possible, but I could still tell he was older. Older guys just give off an older guy vibe. Like Axel does. (Fuckkkk, why does he have to be so much older?) Dem let out a low moan and I made a face at him. Stupid bastard who actually gets to *be* with an older guy. So unfair. But I guess that means Demyx was being serious, he wasn't making that up. He really did have some older guy like me, except this guy is definitely not as hot as my guy. Who wasn't mine. Because he is a fucking asshole who is mad at me goddamnit I didn't even fucking do anything to deserve this and I fucking love him and it isn't fair. Everybody had *someone.* Sora had Riku, Demyx had the periwinkled what's his face dude (Zexy? Is that what Dem calls him?), Tidus has Yuna, Pence had Olette, Hayner has Seifer. And I had nobody even though I love him so fucking much. And I couldn't even call him because Riku had taken my phone away! (Riku was an ass).

I crawled away from the octopus that Demyx and his boy (man?) friend were trying to be like and bumped into a coffee table and then someone tripped over me and it kind of hurt but it wasn't that fucking terrible, just like when you drop a textbook and it lands on your foot; like that.

I looked up, and my double vision cleared just enough to make out a familiar face "Hayner?"

"Roxis?" Wow, Hayner was even more fucking plastered than I was! That was hella impressive because I was schwasted. Like not-sure-I'll-remember-this-tomorrow-but-think-I-will-because-I'm-thinking-about-it drunk. But Hayner was like, should have been wearing a sign around his neck that says "hello world, I'm fucking blackout!"

"Hayn. What's up?"

"'m drunk. Seifer's gonna dumpingme I thnk. 'm sorry 'bout usinyou. Wasn'fair,"

"Don't care, dude. I used you too."

"Yura good dude, Rox. Ackshul doesn't know wha' he'smissin."

I wiped my face because it was wet even though I wasn't crying because why would I be crying? And Hayner was looking at me so intensely and suddenly I really, really wanted to kiss him because I had to kiss somebody because I needed to feel what that's like again, it wasn't Axel but I could pretend and I leaned forward as he leaned forward and suddenly we were tangled together and Hayner climbed on top of me, straddled my waist and our teeth clinked as we kissed desperately, trying to wriggle closer together and then Hayner pulled away and grabbed my hand and pulled me up and we stumbled together drunkenly into the nearest room which fortunately is a bedroom and he pushed me down on the bed and I closed my eyes and Axel was tracing the lines of my abs with his tongue as his fingers push up the hem of my shirt and I feel his fingers unbuttoning my jeans and I moan as I picture how his bright his green eyes are sparkling before his long fingers find me and I stop thinking about anything but Axel and how amazing it feels to have him touch me.

* * *

I woke up the next morning in Sora's parent's third guest bedroom's bed laying curled against my ex. I remembered patches of the night, but was a little hazy on how this part happened. I sat up in a panic, seeing Hayner passed out next to me, realizing I was naked and that he was too. And then I saw my phone on the bedside table. Saw that I has a text.

My heart clenched at the idea of my receiving a text from Axel while I was... otherwise occupied, and I had to get out. I scooted out of the bed, gathered my clothes from where they were scattered about on the floor, got dressed in the bathroom and walked through the mass of passed out or hungover kids scattered throughout the house and out the front door before I finally flipped the phone open to see the text.

It was a multimedia message. I clicked on it to open it, and my mouth went dry.

I had assumed something like this had happened. But seeing a picture of it, in the flesh (so to speak)… It was a photo of Hayner and I tangled together in the bed. I didn't remember things going nearly that far, but then again I also have vague memories of Axel being involved, so I think it's safe to say that my internal monologue of last night wasn't exactly reliable.

The number it was from wasn't one I recognized, and I wished that I hadn't been so out of it that I didn't register someone fucking coming into the room and taking a picture of Hayner and I doing the nasty. I also wondered, with a vague sense of panic, who else had received a copy and what they were doing with it. Who they were showing. If it was all over the school by now. Probably, seeing how my love life had become a topic of much discussion and potential monetary gain. I groaned and buried my face in my hands. IF I was lucky, this would blow over by the end of Spring break. Fuck.

And there was only one thing I had to do now. I scrolled to Axel in my contacts list, chose "send a new message."

10:21am: I'm sorry.

I was so afraid of his response. But I owed him that apology, whether he knew it or not. I had betrayed him, whether he cared or not. And I was going to give it to him.

10:25am: You better be, brat

This puzzled me; did he know? HOW could he know? I hadn't given anyone at the school his contact info or even his last name, so there was no way anyone could have told him. And why would he care, if he did? It made sense when it was followed, moments later, with:

10:26am: I'm sorry too. I shouldn't have said any of that. You just scared me. I can't lose you, not ever.

Well. May as well address that one remaining nagging question:

10:33am: Still want me next week?

10:34am: Is that really a question?

10:36am: Pick me up from the airport tomorrow at noon? Terminal B

10:37am: See you then, kiddo

* * *

Mom and Dad let Riku pick me up to go to the airport since they had last minute packing to do before they left to spend a week in Paris; their plane left later on that evening. So I hopped into the backseat of the Beemer with my week's worth of stuff crammed in a duffle bag and my stomach roiling. Sora sat in the front seat, headphones in his ears as he furiously tried to learn Spanish between now and when the plane landed in Cancun. He was so excited about it that no one had had the heart to tell him yet that everybody in Cancun spoke English anyways. Riku caught my eye in the rearview mirror and shook his head fondly.

"Sora, right?"

I laughed. "He is one of a kind, I'll say that."

"You excited about your big week with your guy?"

"You know it's not like that."

"I think it could be." I rolled my eyes and he continued, unhampered by my cynicism. "Really, Roxas. I do. I saw how frantic he was the other night, when I drove you out there. And I think with the right push he could go over. And I'm not just saying that to win a bet, I really and truly think so."

"C'mon Riku, quit it."

"Dead serious. My advice: try to push him this week. Nothing obvious. Just little subtle sexual things that he'll notice if he's looking for them and won't if he's not. What have you got to lose, if you keep them subtle?"

"Uh huh. And what is a 'subtle' sexual signal, exactly?"

"Anything I did to try to get Sora's attention before I finally asked him out. Oh, right, you didn't know us then. Not wearing a shirt, cuddling into him when you watch a scary movie, making innuendos when it feels appropriate, sleeping in your boxers when you're over at his place… things like that. It all seems normal unless he's attracted to you on any level. And then it'll make him crazy. A couple of accusations about his behavior ought to push him over the edge."

"Riku, you're insane."

"If it works, I will reimburse you for your contribution into the betting pool."

I sighed. "I'll think about it."

* * *

I didn't really expect to think about it. But then I climbed into Axel's Mustang which for some reason had the top up (which was weird, since I think that's the first time since Axel came back that he's driven anywhere with the top up) and I looked over at him and my breath caught like it did every time I looked at Axel and I realized I was just about willing to do *anything* if it would mean I could have a chance.

"Dude, why the hell is the top up?"

Axel rolled his eyes as he pulled away from the terminal, and I almost gave up then. "Did you want to explain to your mother why you're in a Mustang with me when you're supposed to be on a plane to Cancun if we pass her on the way home?"

I blinked, then laughed. He had no idea that Mom and Dad were gonna be in France all week! And there was no reason why he should. How long was I willing to take Riku's advice? Where was my limit? "Good looking out! Mom and Dad are actually hopping a plane to Paris for the weekend on Thursday morning, but you're right, we'd better keep a low profile until then."

A pause. "Um… how low are we talking?"

I wrinkled my nose in thought. "Uh… we should probably stay indoors as much as possible, since you felt the need to get an apartment that's only like three miles from my parent's place and Mom tends to run a lot of errands around town during the day. Moron." I nudged Axel's arm with his elbow and felt Axel go completely rigid. There was an awkward pause, and then I asked "Axe, man, are you okay?"

"Fine!" Axel responded weirdly quick and in what sounded like an octave higher than usual.

I gave him a disbelieving look before shrugging, bracing myself to do something a little crazy, and I stretched up and backwards, deliberately letting my shirt ride up over my stomach before turning and grinning at Axel. "So, what've you got planned?"

* * *

In the middle of the first night I walked into the bathroom to find Axel crouched over the toilet retching.

"Oh shit, Axe are you okay?" He looked up at me, and then Axel turned away from me, clutching his arms around the toilet bowl and I walked over and crouched down next to him, resting one hand on his back as I pressed my other hand against his forehead, trying to determine if he was sick. It didn't seem like it, and I said so.

He closed his eyes as if he was in pain and it made my heart hurt to think he might be. "Axe, what do you need here? What can I do?"

"Go back to bed, Rox." It was harsh. It was blunt. It was hard to hear him, so clearly in a bad place but still not wanting my help. Well, that was just too damn bad; I wouldn't ever leave him to be miserable by himself if I could help it.

"No way, man, you're sick, you shouldn't have to deal with this yourself."

He shoved away from me instead, climbed onto unsteady feet, toddled out of the bathroom saying he needed some air and not to follow.

I know Axel well enough at this point to know "need some air" is Axel speak for "going to go chain smoke" and that was my least favorite thing to be around. So I listened and stayed put.

I sat on the couch with the TV on, waiting for him to come back in. Finally, as the sun was coming up, I decided that I really had to get some sleep, clicked off the TV and went and curled up in the bed in Axel's second bedroom. I thought I heard a door open as I was drifting off, but I was too tired to justify getting up to check.

* * *

"Feeling better this morning?" It was about one pm, but that pretty much counts as morning when you're anywhere between the ages of ten and twenty-five. Also he was in the middle of scrambling eggs, so clearly Axel was on the same page as me regardless.

A laugh. It sounded a little fake, and I furrowed my brow. "No idea what the hell that was, but yeah, I feel fine now." Okay.

"Good." I grinned at him as I noticed the beaten up coffeepot next to Axel was still half full. Score! I grabbed a mug and was pouring myself a cup when-

"'Ey, you're gonna stunt your growth even more, shrimp!" Axel chastened, reaching for the mug.

I scooted away from him, cup intact, and stuck out my tongue. "You are not gonna take away my caffeine, mister. You have your vices, so let me have mine."

Axel froze and turned back to the stove, eyes trained on the scramble pan as though looking away from it for a second would cause the whole batch to be ruined. As if scrambling eggs was even that hard. Axel was acting kinda weird.

"D'you want bacon?" he muttered after a few moments pause that was just slightly too long to be comfortable, and I figured now was a good enough time to try some of Riku's advice.

"Do gay men suck dick?" Oh my god I could FEEL my ears burning. I would definitely not be using Riku's advice in that particular arena again. Time to lie my ass off! "Sorry, that was reflex. Yes, I want bacon, please."

I sipped my coffee, embarrassed, as I waited for Axel to finish the bacon, and a few moments later he was setting two plates down on the table. He sat across the table from me and cleared his throat.

"So how's school?"

I stared at him. _Really?_ "It's break."

"So how was school?"

"Boring." I took a bite of my eggs. They were good.

"And your friends?"

"Fine." Bacon was tasty too.

"You seeing anyone?" Had Axel even picked up his fork yet?

"Axel, you're acting really fucking weird."

Axel cleared his throat again. "Am I?"

"Yeah."

Another pause. Way too many weird little pauses happening lately.

"Sorry. Maybe I'm still a little off from last night." Then Axel picked up his fork and started eating his eggs and I relaxed a little.

"Ah." I took another sip of my coffee.

* * *

Axel and I had been playing Super Smash Brothers for the last hour and a half, and I had been progressively working my way down the roster to my least used characters, finally settling on Jigglypuff, who I absolutely sucked with. And yet I hadn't lost a single game.

"Okay, seriously, you NEVER let me slam you this hard in Smash, especially not with freaking Jigglypuff. This can't be just residual illness bullshit, now what the hell is wrong. Are you mad at me or something?"

Axel blinked at me owlishly. "I- I told you, I'm still weirdly off from last night, I guess. That's all."

"Stop lying, you've been acting weird ever since you picked me up at the airport. Do you not want me here or something?" There were really only two possibilities: Axel didn't want me here at all, or he was actually reacting to what I was doing. I really really hoped it was the latter.

"Of course I want you here, dumbass," he replied, smacking me (gently) upside the head with a controller.

"Well then could you fucking act like it," I grumbled, trying to hold back the grin that wanted to stretch across my mouth and make my cheeks hurt. I was pretty sure I was still smiling a little, though.

"I'm sorry, I didn't realize you were so emotionally needy. I will go out of my way to ensure that you don't feel neglected from here on out."

Now I knew I was smiling and couldn't stop, so I rolled my eyes. "I don't need all of that, maybe you could just, I don't know, actually play the freaking game or something?"

"I think I can manage that," Axel retorted, sticking his tongue out at me.

* * *

So, if there was even a hope that this was working, it was time to step up my game. For lacrosse, we were required to have a solid foundation in anything that could improve our performance, including areas of body awareness and flexibility. And what's the universally recognized most sexual nonsexual athletic activity? Five points to Gryffindor if you guessed yoga. And just to up the ante… I had stripped down to my boxers and nothing else.

I was alternating between downward dog, crow pose and cobra when Axel walked into the living room and made a weird noise that sounded a bit like a sparrow being bludgeoned with a falling brick and disappearing back into the kitchen where I suddenly heard running water. Score!

Once I was done *cough* exercising, I disappeared into the bathroom with only the smallest towel I had been able to find in Axel's linen closet. It was ever so slightly larger than a washcloth. I emerged from the bathroom almost embarrassed by my lack of modesty when I heard a crash from the living room, followed by: "I HAVE TO GO MEET ZEXION!"

Axel was halfway out the door before it even occurred to me that this could be Demyx's Zexion. I didn't get to ask, either, because by the time I opened my mouth I could see Axel vaulting into his car through the window.

* * *

When Axel showed back up an hour or so later, I had put sweatpants back on, but was continuing my whole new shirtless fashion statement. I had told Axel that this was normal, which was a total lie, but he didn't know that. I buried my face into Axel's (tragically hoodie-clad) chest so that I didn't have to look at the absolutely horrifying Japanese thriller Axel had happened to own and I had picked for the movie night for the sole purpose of clinging to Axel with impunity. And yes, his abs were totally as nice as they looked.

"Why is that kid so *creepy*?" I whispered in his ear, and Axel had suddenly scooted out from under me and was halfway into the kitchen.

"Popcorn?! Can't have a movie without popcorn and beer! I'll be right back!"

"What? Don't leave me alone!" Because one, that undermined the point of the scary movie, and two, the movie was freaking scary!

I admit it, the movie scared me. So when Axel went out to smoke, I went with him and just held my breath. And when Axel said he needed to run to the grocery store and would I be okay by myself for a little while (oh, right, he still thinks Mom is around) I insisted on tagging along (let's just put the top up in case Mom happens to be out for some reason!).

Axel barely said a word during the drive, but I kept wanting to speak, to ask _"are you seeing anyone?" "Is she pretty?" "Is she prettier than me?" "Could you ever think of me that way?" "Is this week doing *anything* to you?"_ but stopping, thinking better of it.

I waited in the car for fifteen minutes of agony, because I couldn't tell him I was fine to go in the store without admitting I'd lied. When he finally returned and shoved his bag of a pack of cigarettes, a frozen everything pizza, and a six-pack of Fat Tire at me, I looked at them and wanted to scream. Instead, I raised an eyebrow at his choices.

"This was an emergency?"

"Dude, don't judge until you're a smoker."

"I will never be a smoker."

"Then you will never get to judge me."

Cue eye roll. "Whatever, jackass. Can we go home now?"

Axel didn't say another word to me that night, but at 12:01 am I was lying in my bed unable to sleep because there was a ghost under the covers with me and I was going to die oh my god and I did not want to die alone. I climbed (bolted) out of the bed and tiptoed down the hall, pushing Axel's door open and sticking my head in.

"Axe, are you awake?"

A half sigh, then: "No."

"I'm super restless; the movie really freaked me out. Can I sleep with you tonight?" I was trying not to beg, but I really couldn't be alone right now and didn't know what to do if he said no. So it was a huge relief when Axel scooted over in the bed, making room.

"Yeah," he half-whispered, and I gratefully crawled into the bed, unable to camaflougue my disappointment when Axel lay down and rolled as far away from the other side of the bed as possible, facing away from me. But I curled up against his back anyways, and the warmth and comfort that washed through me from the gentle contact was the most amazing sensation I had experienced to date, so I closed my eyes and let them guide me into slumber.

* * *

I let out a tiny scream and threw the frying pan into the sink, pointing the fire extinguisher that I was so glad Axel had into the mess and spraying liberally. Maybe scrambling eggs was harder than I had thought. Fuck.

But I did still know how to operate a coffee maker and how to pour cereal, and in the world of breakfast making that had to count for something, right? So five minutes later I pushed the door to Axel's room open with my foot because I was carrying two cups of coffee and Axel fell right off the bed. I guess he thinks me being proactive is surprising. What an ass. But once I made sure that the ass didn't have brain damage from smacking his head against the floor or something I dragged him into the kitchen where he took in the destruction and ruffled my hair, calling me a failure at life and I wanted to push him into the counter and kiss him. I threw a pop tart at his head instead, which he caught and popped in the toaster.

"So, d'you miss your friends?" Axel asked around the pop tart wedged in his mouth as he plopped into the seat across from me.

Shrug. "Not that much; I'll see them again in a few days, and I'm here with you." _And I would always rather be with you._

"What about a boyfriend, you seeing anyone?" Punch to the gut, that one.

I tried to feign nonchalance as I unscrewed the top of the milk carton. "Not- not really. There's this one guy I like, who I guess you could say I'm kind of trying to see, but I don't think he thinks of me like that."

There was maybe a three second pause before "I'm sure he does." And I tried to contain the sudden hysteria in my gut.

Instead I shrugged and smiled. "I mean, obviously I hope so, but I've done about everything I can think of to get his attention and nothing. So I guess it's about time to cut my losses; as long as I can be near him, y'know?"

"Have you told him? After all, you never know how someone's gonna respond to you until you try."

I shrugged again. "I mean, he's straight, so what's the point in telling him?"

Axel raised a pierced eyebrow. "I somehow doubt he's as straight as you think. Unless experimenting is a lot more common these days." My eyes widened. Oh no no no no no.

"What?"

"Oh, yeah, I just… the other day I, uh, I got an email that, um, it had a picture of you." Oh holy shit. Oh, fuck my life and everything in it. "With this guy. I guess maybe you were blackout or something, if you don't remember. But you both seemed very" he cleared his throat and I wanted to fall through the floor and burn to death in Hell rather than hear the rest of this "into it, so I'm gonna guess he's more into you than you think." My cereal bowl was suddenly fascinating, mostly because I was sure there was no way that Axel's eyes would be hidden amongst my extra-frosted frosted flakes. I could feel my ears burning, as though I had a third-degree sunburn. "Rox?"

"That wasn't him," My voice was so quiet *I* could barely hear it, so I wasn't even sure if Axel did. "That was my ex, Hayner. I was upset about how badly things were going with- with the guy I like, I got trashed at a party and he had just fought with his boyfriend; we both kinda backslid and somebody snapped a picture. By the time I found out it was all over the school, but yeah, I've seen it. I have no idea how you ended up with a copy." Deep breath; "I'm sorry."

"You're sorry? Why are you sorry?" _Oh, I don't know, because it happened? Because I wanted it to be you the whole time? Because you saw it? For putting you through most of a week of subtle flirting that clearly didn't do a goddamn thing?_

"You shouldn't have had to see that. It didn't have anything to do with you."

"Like hell! Rox, you're my best friend. If shit like that happens to you, I want to know about it." It hit me in the gut, like it did every time I heard it. _You're my best friend_. That was it, the phrase that damned me, and all my wishes and dreams, every day. _My best friend_. The word that meant we were irrevocably impossible. _Friend_. And he didn't even know it.

I bit my lip and looked away, struggling not to show how much it hurt. "I still wish you hadn't."

* * *

I avoided Axel for the rest of the day. I put on a shirt for the first time in three days, and then put on a hoodie on top, just for good measure. I put in my earbuds, cranked my iPod, and mostly stayed in my room. I did all my spring break homework, and read two books. Then I was out of things to do in my room, so I cleaned Axel's kitchen. At first Axel tried to talk to me, but I pointedly ignored him (harder than it sounds) and he eventually gave up.

That night Axel was sitting on the couch watching Mythbusters, and I stood in the doorway of my room staring at him. I finally steeled myself enough to move forwards, hop over the back of the couch and sit cross-legged next to Axel. I stared at my lap not saying anything for a good five minutes, before the words came tumbling out on their own "I didn't want you to know that I'm not perfect."

Axel snapped his head over, eyes wide enough for him to be mistaken for an owl, and I exhaled sharply.

"I want you to think that I always make the right decisions and that I do things well and that even though yes, I am a dumb teenager and I'm gonna make some stupid decisions, I didn't want you to know that I do things like sleep with the ex who cheated on me when I can't get the guy I actually like to look twice at me because my self esteem is just that low."

Axel wet his lips and I followed the motion with my eyes. "Do you still have feelings for him?"

I'm pretty sure the only word to describe my laugh at that was self-deprecating. "Honestly, I'm not sure if I ever had feelings for him. He just took the sting out of not being wanted by the person I wanted. Until he decided he didn't want me either. Pathetic, right?" I paused, realized I didn't want an answer. "But I didn't mean to turn this into a 'poor me' pity party, I just wanted you to know why I didn't say anything. Why sometimes I don't tell you things. Won't tell you things."

Axel grabbed my arm like it was an anchor and I turned to look at him. Axel took a deep breath and looked far too deeply into my eyes and I wanted to look away but couldn't. "Rox, you probably don't remember this, but I sent you a letter once in which I told you that you are perfection. And I mean that now even more than I meant it then. No matter what crazy things you do or stupid decisions you may make, or pictures of you I might stumble across on the internet, you're still Roxas, and you're still the best thing that I've ever known." I felt my lower lip tremble as my heart skipped a beat and I realized I was going to cry if I didn't get away from him immediately.

"I remember you saying that."

"I meant it." No signs of letting me go. I needed to get away, dammit!

"You hardly knew me then. You hardly know me now."

"That's bullshit and you know it. I know you better than I've ever known anyone." I could feel a tear fighting to push its way out of my eye and I couldn't deal with this a second longer.

"I don't know what that says about you, then," I broke his grip on his arm and pushed past him and out of the room, fleeing to my room where I closed and locked the door before burying my face in my pillow so there was no chance of Axel hearing my sobs.

He was everything I wanted and could ever want, and he did love me. But not like that. Never like that. And we were never going to cross that line, and I didn't even know where I could go from here.

* * *

I woke up early the next morning and bolted. I didn't know where I was going, just that I needed to not be with Axel for a while.

There aren't a lot of places for a seventeen-year-old to go in a place as full of dead ends as Twilight Town. There are even fewer to go when you're trying to find one to get away from your best friend/love-of-your-life, and almost none when the rest of your friends are also out of town. So I wandered.

I spent around half an hour in the library, idly flipping through books, ignoring a call from Axel while I was inside. Shortly after leaving the library I wandered into a Starbucks, where I spent at least fifteen minutes picking out a half-caf extra-whip caramel macchiato with a shot of vanilla over ice, ignoring another call from Axel as I finally left the shop.

Then I wandered over to the skate park I'd spent a lot of time at when I was younger, before Mom had declared it a hazardous activity with no benefits whatsoever and sold my skateboard in a yard sale. I sat, watching other teens performing ollies and flips, a few trying to grind down the railings (some more successfully than others), thinking to myself how I could probably do better, sedately sipping my coffee. I wasn't sure how long I sat watching, but Axel called twice while I was there; I let them both go to voicemail.

When I realized I was hungry, I stopped at a sandwich place and got an italian sub, no tomatoes, extra sprouts. Axel called again the second I sat down to eat, and with a sigh, I hit the "ignore" button again. But with the way things were going, I had to admit that ignoring Axel for my own benefit wasn't exactly working out for me.

Finally, around noon I returned, grudgingly, to Axel's apartment to find the redhead was sitting at the bottom of the stairs with a huge pile of cigarette butts next to his foot and my heart seized. As mad as I could ever be at him, I hated to think of him smoking and the ugly death he invited every time he lit up. But Axel smiled cheekily and saluted me and it brought me back to the moment. "Hey Rox."

"What are you doing down here?"

"Having a cigarette, dumbass."

"*Really?*" I nudged the (fucking ginormous) pile of cigarette butts with the toe of my shoe. "'Cause it looks like you're trying to become a carton-a-day smoker."

"What do you care how much I smoke?" _Because I love you, you freaking moron!_

"I thought we covered the whole 'I don't want to have to jump onto your coffin when you die young' thing already."

Axel rolled his eyes and it made me madder that he didn't even care that he was slowly killing himself. "And where have you been, mister?"

"What do you care where I've been?"

"You're my responsibility this week, squirt." Anger splintered my vision. I knew from last night that this was never gonna be more than what it was now, but how Axel could so cavalierly tell me I was his fucking 'responsibility'? I hadn't let go of the only wish I'd had since I was thirteen quite that quickly.

"Well in that case - out." I shouldered past him and walked up to the apartment, blood three degrees short of boiling. How dare he. How DARE he. I slammed the apartment door and stormed into the room I was staying in, slamming that door too. Then locking it for good measure. I didn't care if I ever saw him again, the fucking asshole.

* * *

I determinedly refused to come out of Axel's second bedroom for the rest of the day. I was freaking starving by the end, but some things are more important than nutrition. Like pride. Axel had knocked a few times and even unlocked the door and stuck his head in once, but I threw things from the desk at him until he closed the door again and then wedged the desk chair under the knob so he couldn't do it again.

A little after midnight I smelled all my favorite Chinese food items and felt my mouth watering. As previously mentioned, I was STARVING and I could SMELL egg rolls. I love egg rolls. Egg rolls may be more important than pride. And it wasn't like Axel was sitting outside my door; I bet I could sneak in and out of the kitchen without him seeing me, especially if I used my army crawling skills from lacrosse. I moved the chair gingerly and unlocked the door, pushing it open and my eyes went wide.

Why I would ever assume Axel wasn't doing something ridiculous like sitting outside my door escaped me, because nine times out of ten he would be.

I went to slam the door, but something stopped it when it was just inches from closing. I tried again, and then again even more desperately, but at the point Axel was putting his own weight into pushing the door open and for someone as spindly as him he weighed a lot. I knew when I was beaten. Mostly because Axel was currently shoving me down into the chair I had just been using to keep the door shut.

Axel sat down on the bed and I looked between him and the door frenetically, wondering if I could make it back out before he could catch me.

"Try it, I dare you." Axel growled. I felt my shoulders slump and I looked in Axel's direction (really at his socked feet, but that is neither here nor there. His socks didn't match). "Now then. You've been acting like a little bitch for the last two days and seeing as my being physically ill was not a valid excuse for my erratic behavior in the world according to Roxas, I would like to know why. And being embarrassed about that picture is not an excuse since I straight up told you it doesn't affect my perception of you."

I _glared,_ wishing I was a basilisk and could turn him to stone. "The fuck do you care? I'm just some goddamn obligation, right?"

"Um, Roxas, what the hell are you talking about?" Oh, and now he has no idea how much what he said hurt? Fucking convenient.

"You never wanted me here this week, right? You only said yes to humor me since I'm like your kid brother or whatever and you weren't going to say no and you just can't wait to hand me back over to my parents so I'm not your responsibility anymore. So I'll just stay in here and be quiet until the week is over and I can go home and then you never have to deal with me again if you don't actually want to. How's that sound?"

"Whoa, whoa Rox, I'm going to need you to back it the fuck up right now because I am not following you at all."

"It's what you said!"

"Are you high? I would never say anything like that."

I reeled back to really let him have it, and then the confused and hurt expression on his face stopped me. I deflated like a balloon. I couldn't bring myself to knowingly hurt him, even if it wouldn't hurt him in anything resembling how every single thing he did hurt me. Instead, I settled for "This week just hasn't been quite what I was expecting."

"Okay… so tell me what you were expecting, and we can fix it."

I sighed. If only it could just be like that. "It isn't that simple, Axe. You can't just fix this."

"Try me."

I sort of smiled at him, but I don't know if it really counted as a smile. "I appreciate the effort. I really do. But there's no point to it."

"Roxas, you just told me that you think I don't care about you even though I have told you repeatedly that nothing could be further from the truth. Obviously something is wrong, and it concerns me. So talk." Damn him.

"It's just the whole bullshit thing we talked about yesterday; not being wanted can do a number to a person. It's making me doubt everything, to be honest." Well, that was half true. Axel not wanting me *was* making me nuts.

Axel bit his lip slightly and looked at me determinedly. "Roxas, if there is one thing in this whole world you can believe in indiscriminately you should know that it will always be me." The way his eyes shined at me as he said it almost made me believe that he could feel about me the way I felt about him. That he did feel that way about me. And in that moment I had to believe the lie, because I couldn't keep it together with or without it, but in this moment I know that without it I would never be okay again. I sobbed and flung myself into Axel's arms, clutched myself to him as I buried my face in his chest. I could hear Axel's desire to talk before he even opened his mouth and I just couldn't. I shook my head, not sure he'd even be able to understand the motion and I choked out "Don't. Please, just... I don't want to be alone." _Please don't make me face reality. Just let me pretend tonight, and I'll never ask you for anything more._

I couldn't hold in my tears, and I didn't stop crying until the emotional exhaustion dragged me into a restless sleep. But the last thing I registered before I slipped away was that Axel's arms were still holding me just as tightly hours later as they had been when I first fell into them.

* * *

I woke early in a better mood than I had been in days. I realized it was because I was still wrapped in his arms, and I also realized that if I had even a hope of preserving this illusion for myself I couldn't still be in the bed when he woke up. I couldn't face the moment when he realized I was okay and went back to the way he normally was. I scooted out of the bed, fortunately without waking him, and moved around the pile of spoiled Chinese food (what a waste!) into the kitchen where I started coffee brewing and checked the fridge for milk for cereal. Axel had apparently used up the last of the milk last night, but I did find more Chinese! Sweet and sour pork with shrimp fried rice, which was all right, but also egg rolls! I grabbed a set of chopsticks and the food from the fridge and was just starting to dig in when a sleepy-eyed Axel stumbled in the kitchen, clearly aiming for the coffee pot but stopping short when he saw me.

"Hi," I smiled at him.

Axel finished his trek, poured himself a mug of coffee, and then suddenly. "Roxas?"

"Yeah?" I replied, hoping inanely that he wasn't going anywhere with this.

"Can we please save the mood swings and erratic behavior until after I've had my coffee? I can't keep up with this anymore, much less without caffeine."

I bristled, hurt. I was acting normal, thank you! He was the one being weird lately. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"And here we go," Axel muttered, knocking back his coffee as though it was a shot of whisky. "Look, Rox, you have to admit you've been acting a little weird the last few days; one minute you're perfectly happy and the next minute you're sobbing into my shirt. Five minutes later, you're acting like a sullen teenager. It would just be nice to get a little warning before you change up on me."

I glared at him again. Okay, maybe that was kind of true, but he was just being such a confusing ass that it was *hardly* my fault. "I don't know if you've noticed, but I *am* a sullen teenager."

Axel sighed and massaged his temples before pouring himself another mug. "Well then the *rest* of your behavior is weird. I don't care what you want to qualify it as, but can just you pick a mode and stick to it? Because it's way too early and I've already got a headache and I don't know how much more of this I can deal with." And there it was again. I was his 'responsibility' he couldn't 'deal with' me much longer. Well then why should he have to!

"So what I said last night actually is true, and you *are* sick of me and want me to go away."

"God DAMNIT Roxas, I never said that!" Axel slammed the mug into the counter and I jumped from the sound, but continued on my tangent. I was a man possessed, and he was just going to admit that he was done with me and then maybe I could finally, finally let him go.

"If it's not true, then why are you so angry with me? Why did you spend the first three days I was here acting so fucking distant that it was like you were barely here to begin with? Why didn't you - " Oh my god, please tell me he didn't hear that. I clapped my hand over my mouth, sure my eyes were so far open that they might pop out of my head at any moment, shaking my head, oh no, no, no, I didn't ask him why he didn't do anything, that must have been someone else.

"Why didn't I what? Roxas?" I shook my head no so hard I could feel my brain slosh in my head, kept my hand firmly over my mouth. _I'm not telling you that, no._ "Why didn't I *what,* Roxas?" Axel knelt before me, his hands latching onto my shoulders, one moving to gently pull the hand from my mouth, staring into my eyes as they filled with tears and I tried desperately to look anywhere but at him. "Roxas, LOOK at me. WHAT DIDN'T I DO?"

"Anything!" The word burst from me without my consent; it would have been stopped if he hadn't taken my hand away. I shoved Axel away from me, prayed he didn't see the tears welling in my eyes. "You didn't do *anything,* and that's what's wrong."

"I didn't… Roxas, that doesn't make sense. If I didn't do anything then why are you upset?" I shook my head again, refused to look at him. He was going to know and I couldn't watch things fall apart forever. "What did you want me to do?" His words were quiet, but I heard them, felt my shoulder stiffen. I focused on the upper right corner of the kitchen cabinet, trying to remember what it had felt like to wake up in his arms because that was maybe the happiest thing I could remember and the only thing stopping me from melting to a puddle of hopeless self-loathing in this moment. "Roxas, please." It was the way he said my name, like this mattered to him for more than just having an excuse to leave me behind forever that did it. He said my name like one in love might say the name of their lover before they proposed, and even though I knew that I was kidding myself, knew I was completely insane, knew that I was never going to forgive myself for falling back into this, I allowed myself to reply.

"That's not the question, Axel." My voice cracked as I said his name, and I winced at it.

"Then what is the question?" Axel breathed these words in a way that sounded like a prayer and I didn't know what to do.

"The question, Axel," I exhaled shudderingly, moments from a floodgate opening and crying myself out all over again, except this time there would be nothing to stop them, not ever."Was what didn't I want you to do?" And there it was, all laid bare between us. I loved him, and he was just seconds from his face curling in disgust and walking away from me somewhere I could never follow.

"Are you- does this-"

I lurched up from my seat and pushed past him, leaving him kneeling before the chair. I paced the kitchen like a lizard in a terrarium, unable to pass up on these last few seconds before he hated me, but wanting so desperately to get away from it all, to not see everything slip away from me. "It's stupid. It's nothing, or at least it should be. I've been- I've been overreacting to everything, I don't need- don't *want* anything from you that you don't want to give me. I'm just a stupid teenager, after all, and I couldn't ask you for more. I know I wouldn't get it, even if you were... But it's you, god it's always been you. You're the only one, since I even knew what that meant, you're the stupid reason I was with Hayner and the reason I can't seem to act like an adult when I'm with you, and I knew it was stupid, ridiculous, insane of me to even hope, but I thought maybe if we spent long enough together you could maybe see me differently. It was impossible and knew that, I fucking *knew* it, but I still let myself hope, god why did I do that? And it was so unfair of me to take out my disappointment on you and if you hate me for all of this I understand, I kind of hate me too, but please, can I just stay until Sunday, just to stay near you for now? You never have to see me again after that, I promise. And I'm sorry, I'm so sorry to have put you through all of this, I had no right. I-"

Axel had climbed to his feet as I was talking and I realized that the closer he stepped to me the faster I was talking, as though I thought on some level that if I could lay truly everything bare before he told me he never wanted to see me again he would change his mind. Finally he clapped his hand over the my mouth and I wanted to cry again. _Then why'd you move my hand to begin with?!_ He looked into my eyes calmly and I trembled. "Roxas. Are you saying what I think you're saying? No, let me rephrase. Are you saying that… that you love me?" I tried to look away, but Axel held tight to my chin and wouldn't let me. "Roxas. This is important. Do you love me?"

I whimpered. _Of course I love you, I've always loved you. Please don't make me say it, why would you make me admit it in so many words before you walk out of my life forever?_ I closed my eyes, and nodded.

"Holy Christ, Rox, why didn't you just fucking take my advice and *say* something?" My eyes snapped open as I was pulled flush against him in a clumsy hug.

"Wha-what?"

"I've been in love with you since the moment I met you, dumbass. It just… took me a while to realize it."

I exhaled a breath I hadn't even realized I was holding and pulled back to look at him, comprehension slowly dawning. "How long?"

"Um… since Wednesday night?" He scratched the back of his head so sheepishly that I suddenly knew, without a doubt, that he meant it, and my heart seized in my chest and I was laughing through the tears that had to come out somehow and I hit him in the chest.

"You fucking asshole, and you didn't say anything either?"

"Well you were going on and on about how you were in love with this one guy-"

"Yeah, that was you, idiot."

"-And before that I had seen a picture of you in which you looked, if you'll pardon the expression, taken. So excuse me for not rushing to get my heart broken."

"Poor baby, two whole days of uncertainty and torment! I'll alert the media, see if we can get you a medal."

"You know what, never mind, you're an asshole and I want nothing to do with you." I didn't even believe that for a second, in part because I knew him and I knew when he meant something and he meant this. He really loved me. Also because the smile on his face was currently threatening to split his chin off from the rest of his face it was so wide.

"Better than being an oblivious idiot for seventeen years,"

"I'll take oblivious idiot over prickly little bitch any day."

I gasped in mock horror, wiping my eyes in a way I hoped was sneaky. "You take that back, you fucking beanpole."

And suddenly either he was kissing me or I was kissing him or we were kissing each other, I'm still not sure, but it was messy and sloppy and real and perfect and more than I'd ever hoped it would be, though I had always hoped for it. And then we pulled away from each other and I stared at him, wide-eyed, gripped with panic that he'd had a change of heart before Axel exhaled the three most beautiful words I'd ever heard.

"I love you."

And I looked into his sparkling green eyes and knew he meant it and I realized that I couldn't even begin to express in words what this meant to me or how much I had always cared for him, so I just pulled him back down to me and kissed him again.

* * *

AN: "Terah" is the Hindu word for Thirteen, according to google/wikipedia. No, I didn't spell any names wrong. Also, I am aware that Hail Mary passes are in football. Roxas isn't.

Ps: Yes I know what Axel's note said. No, I'm not telling. ;D

Pps: Happy AkuRoku day! 3


End file.
